Speaking ARCHICAD

BIM and authoring tools have their own language. It is vital to speak a common language when working in a BIM workflow with consultants, both outside our practice and within our project teams. There are several great articles you can read on these concepts here and here. More specifically, it is important to speak a common language within your own practice, so that everyone understands what you are talking about when you discuss certain modeling methods, tools, processes and difficulties we may face. There is a great post on that here. Read those three posts, they have a lot of valuable content!

I want to speak more specifically about ARCHICAD though. If you are reading this, I will assume this is your tool of choice for architectural design and documentation. Using the correct vocabulary is so important when using any tool, especially when trying to troubleshoot or resolve an issue with your tool or process. Within ARCHICAD, there is a perfect example; Views and Viewpoints. Understanding the difference between these two terms can go a long way into conveying your problems to your software manager, project manager, technical support technician and even your design team. More than this, understanding the difference can go a long way to troubleshooting the problems you may face with ARCHICAD yourself.

Why aren’t my views showing correctly?

Why wont my markers link to the correct view?

These are the kinds of questions I see every week. They could easily be answered by understanding the difference between Views and Viewpoints. First off, we can look at the two as they relate to the navigator. The Viewpoints are the sources for all views, more commonly known as the Project Map content. Views, on the other hand, are directly related to the View Map. They are essentially Viewpoints with specific settings for Layers, Scale, Model View Settings, etc. If your view is not showing correctly, it is most likely because you are actually looking at a Viewpoint, and simply need to review how tab based navigation works in ARCHICAD 20.

Markers linking incorrectly can also be cleared up by understanding marker references. If you link your marker to the first placed drawing of a selected Viewpoint, you will potentially have different results or limited flexibility as compared to the first placed drawing of a selected View.

The lesson to learn here is simple; learn the tools and learn the language used in those tools. If we all speak the same language, we can all work together to find the solutions and processes that work best for all of us!